my vedana

literacy...new media...education...life

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Materiality and microblogging

So this is number two in a list of three. It's the materiality of devices. I’m drawing a bit on Daniel Miller here, who underlines the significance of material objects in cultural life. When we start thinking of web-based communication we very often get seduced by the virtual spaces that are created and forget the very basic nature of the material objects we use. As these become woven into everyday life they become normalised to the extent that they are almost rendered invisible. So today at the British Academy, the audience was connected in a variety of ways. Most notable of these ways seemed to be the presence of i-phones and Blackberrys, used to enter the Twitter backchannel and do other sorts of work, too. Handheld and discreet we are left to our own devices, but yet the devices we have (own) and their affordances are central to mobile microblogging.

'To possess the machines, he only needs economic capital; to appropriate them and use them in accordance with their specific purpose he must have access to embodied cultural capital; either in person or in proxy.' (Bourdieu 1997:50)